What Strategy Should We Now Adopt to Protect Academic Freedom?
by Stephen Joel Truchlenberg
There was a time when the institution of tenure looked unassailable. Its role in the defense of academic freedom was commonly acknowledged. Even state legislators paid tribute to the fact that today's controversial idea could be
come tomorrow's staid axiom, and that academicians needed protection from those individuals - including university presidents and ambitious politicians - who for some reason felt hostile toward professors and their thinking.
That "golden" has now departed, and we are unlikely to see its return. Why this should be the case can be better understood if we take a comprehensive look at what were once America's most respected professions: medicine, law, and banking. Those pr
ofessions having been beaten into new and once-unimaginable shapes, the turn of higher education will do any better than other professions have in devising a collective response that Americans in general, and their government representatives in particular
, will be willing to accept.
Where we are right now with regard to these principles was summarized by the title of a recent editorial in the Washington Post, "Tenure Under Pressure." What the Post had to say was what everyone already knows: In a nation actively re
dedicating itself to the principles of universal competition, job security, especially when it is conferred on a "lifetime" basis, sticks in the craw of Americans who have grown used to worrying about their employment - even (or especially) if they are we
ll into their fifties and have been serving the same employer for several decades. Distaste for the institution of tenure has also been intensified by a variety of academic "scandals," including widespread media coverage on the subjects of grade inflatio
n, the use of teaching assistants to perform as much as 40 percent of the instruction offered at some universities, and the alleged failure of some tenured professors to pay any attention to their students at all (by keeping their posted office hours, for
example).
Last February, "60 Minutes" took an intensely critical look at higher education. Most depressing was footage devoted to reaching assistants with a limited command of English. Over and over again, "60 Minutes" emphasized that "your kids" stood about
as much chance of studying with their schools' most famous professors as the rest of us have of flying to the moon. "60 Minutes" identified as the major cause of this state of affairs the institution called tenure, which tends to penalize academicians s
o foolish as to demonstrate a love of teaching rather than research.
Needless to say, the "60 Minutes" presentation - which focused heavily on the University of Arizona - has not gone uncriticized. Lingua Franca reprinted the text of the broadcast in a recent issues and added a bitter repudiation by the presid
ent of the University of Arizona as well as a critique by the former editor of the Journal of Mathematical Psychology, one of whose articles "60 Minutes" had ridiculed on the basis of its title. In its issue dated April 2, 1995, even a daily newsp
aper like the Arizona Republic summarized some of the criticisms being directed at the television program - indirect proof of how wide the episode's influence had in fact been. As a sharp indicator of what the producers of "60 Minutes" thought the
American public was ready for - what its members would willingly "buy into" - these and other counterreactions spoke volumes.
Tenure wove its way into and through many of the critiques of higher education that were offered in the early months of 1995. Speaking before the U.S. Senate's subcommittee devoted to education, arts, and the humanities, Thomas H. Kean, president of
Drew University and a former governor of New Jersey, declared that higher education "is being viewed {in today's America} less as an investment and more as an expense."
Higher education has to be restructured, Kean declared, to meet the needs of our nation's economic marketplace - and few of his listeners doubted that changes in the institution of tenure would be part of such a restructuring. Indeed, an article in
the New York Times on February 23, 1995, one day after Kean gave his testimony - "State Universities Reshaped in the Era of Budget Cutting" - did not hesitate to cite a growing emphasis on faculty "productivity" as part of the current mood, one of
steadily intensifying hostility between state officials and the higher education systems they govern.
And a few weeks later, on March 21, 1995, the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE) announced a two-year study project, "New Pathways: Faculty Careers and Employment in the 21st Century." The AAHE news release was headlined, "Higher Educa
tion Association to Lead New Dialogue on Tenure," and the release included the following observation:
- In a 1989 survey of 5,000 faulty by the Carnegie Association for the Advancement of Teaching, 29 percent of all faculty, 32 percent of female faculty, and 39 percent of faculty under the age of 39 agreed with the statement: "Aboliti
on of tenure would, on the whole, improve the quality of higher education."
"The Future of Academic Tenure" was the subject of the Spring 1995 issue of Priorities published by the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. Priorities observed that "concerns about tenure [now] extend to the bo
ardrooms of private colleges as well as the halls of state legislatures." And on March 31, in its report on the AAHE project (headlined "Tenure Reexamined"), the Chronicle of Higher Education quoted R. Eugene Price, former provost of Antioch Unive
rsity and head of the AAHE project: "Something has happened to the image of the university. The university is seen [by the American public] as a place where we struggle for private advantage. Students do it, faculty members do it, administrators do it."
A much smaller article in the same issue of the Chronicle reported on a South Carolina legislator who had just introduced a bill to eliminate tenure at the state's public colleges, including tenure previously granted. The article noted that "
Thirty-two of the 124 members of the House of Representatives have [already] endorsed it."
In short, it would not be accurate to say that "the dam is about to burst." The water is already on its way down the valley, and if we're not piling up the sandbags right now, then we're probably going to be washed into a new state of being altogeth
er.
The Sin of Being Comfortable
Within the lifetime of a fairly young person, lay persons have taken over the job of telling physicians what to do. Professional administrators rather than M.D.'s now manage our hospitals. Doctors who don't knuckle under to the
demands of insurance companies and their underwriters, especially when it comes to charging less for their services, soon find themselves with sharply declining incomes they fail to qualify for reimbursement. In the legal profession, the picture is comp
arably dire. How recent was the time when a senior partnership in a law firm was the de facto equivalent of tenure? Now, even the most major law firms are imploding as senior partners are laid off left and right. Younger associates look about as
nervously as assistant professors of English or French or medical anthropology for their "next job."
Banking? Gone forever is the day when it was regularly ranked with medicine as one of the professions in which the American people had "faith." Teaching as the elementary and secondary school levels, and other forms of civil service, were once rega
rded as the very definition of job security. That day, too, is gone forever. Nor is it necessary to go on at length with regard to middle managers in American business, hundreds of thousands of whom have been squeezed out of our steadily flattening corp
orate pyramids. Likewise the military.
No the American way of life today is built around an entirely new axiom: that the eighth deadly sin, far worse than the other seven, is the sin of feeling (and looking) comfortable. The related forces of insecurity, competitiveness, and accountabili
ty are being imposed on every profession and every way of earning a living. State legislators who "talk tough" toward and fellow American who can be designated as a "freeloader" are themselves being hit with term-limit proposals. The race into new infor
mation technologies threatens any business or businessperson who falls even a year behind. Even Social Security and Medicare get bracketed with other questionable "entitlements."
Is it any wonder, therefore, that the traditional pillars of the academy - and tenure most of all - are in the process of wobbling like the Philistine temple at the hands of Samson? Americans have learned to resent those who are comfortable if this
comfort is purchased by anything other than inherited wealth, obtained from private sources. Can we feel astonished, therefore, when they allegedly comfortable inhabitants of the academic world, who can assure their incomes past the age of seventy?
To alter this perception would require a remarkable act on the part of American academicians: they would have to forestall "outside forces" by making themselves less professionally comfortable. They would have to impose, on themselves, disciplinary
procedures with teeth. The actual number of professors deprived of tenure each year, now a laughable fraction of al those employed in higher education, would have to undergo a steady rise.
Is self-discipline of this kind even remotely conceivable? In this connection, there was a particularly telling point in a story published by the Chronicle of Higher Education on April 21, 1995. In 1992, the University of Minnesota and the U
niversity of North Carolina at Charlotte made a surprising discovery. For several months, a faculty member had been holding tenured positions at both schools, commuting regularly between them. The crucial sentence in the story read: "Minnesota spent
more than two years trying to dismiss him." [Emphasis added.]
Even America's municipal bureaucracies move faster than that when they discover a gross act of moral and professional turpitude being committed by someone on their payrolls. But as even this brief article managed to suggest, the institution of tenur
e, by its very nature, creates what I will delicately term "gray areas" - areas having to do with the act of definition. Theoretically, the conditions for removal of tenure are specified in every tenure contract. In practice, however, the application of
those conditions in any particular case is an agonizing matter for those in the act of applying them. They think once. They think twice. And they often forget about it altogether - because they know what a ruckus will ensue, and how their own careers
may be threatened as a result. In the language of our own day, tenure, once awarded, tends to be perceived - by the person who gets it - as an "entitlement." Since those who make decisions with regard to tenure are those who already have it, and who the
refore share this sense of entitlement, the prospects for "inside" rather than "outside" reform - in higher education as in medicine, banking, and law - would seem to be rather dim.
A Conscious Strategy for Self-Preservation
I cannot help put perceive American Higher education as a sitting duck, just begging to be shot out of the water by its critics and outright enemies now proliferating inside and outside of government.
To avoid that fate, those now working in our colleges and universities would have to adopt a number of new principles, which in turn would add up to a conscious strategy for the protection of (and by) academic freedom.
Principle Number One: Restoration of the status quo ante, with the ante being defined as the age when tenure was, in effect, a thirty - or thirty-five-year contract, generally awarded to someone in his or her thirties, and applying unt
il he or she was sixty-five. The principles of academic freedom are much harder to defend when even professors under the age of thirty-nine - nearly 40 percent of them - see tenure as a force that worsens rather than improves the colleges in which they w
ork.
Principle Number Two: The education or re-education of the American public. Too many members of that public have been to college now for us to deny that tenure, as currently defined, has sometimes sheltered outright incompetence and has some
times cast teaching, as opposed to research of less than stellar quality, into outright disfavor. Faculty members in highest education must provide their fellow citizens and political decision makers with facts that overcome the automatic linkage they ar
e tending to make between tenure and the abuse of tenure.
Principle Number Three: Active support for the notion of defined and limited teaching contracts that would replace the award of tenure. Contracts of this kind can be for any number of years - ten, fifteen, or even twenty-five and thirty, sub
ject to periodic reviews of an acceptable sort, with due process. Only when such contracts are actually tried will we know whether they function at least as well as the institution they have replaced, and above all whether they are capable of reducing th
e hostility toward higher education now felt by so many Americans and so many of their political representatives.
These three principles seem to me like solid bases for what I would call an active defense of academic freedom - the kind of self-defense never undertaken, while the going was good, by other American professions. What they have in common is our will
ingness to declare, in effect: "This profession is going to be somewhat harder on itself than it has been up to now. Consequently, there is no need for 'external crackdowns.' Above all, we are going to see that faculty members and administrators respons
ible for denying or withdrawing tenure are no longer subject to, or fearful of, professional retaliation."
It is particularly urgent that those employed in American higher education adopt a tone and perspective that is sensitive to the profound economic insecurity now affecting their fellow Americans. Books like The Jobless Future and The Decli
ne of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era are making it conceivable that employment is on the way to becoming a privilege shared by a minority of our planet's population. Can those who teach and perform research in the American
academy pretend not to understand why angry Americans regard them with envy as being excessively comfortable and exaggeratedly secure?
Willy-nilly, those of us who work in higher education are finding ourselves at the very core of a political process. We need to learn, among other things, how to think even more politically than we have and how to avoid the fate that has already bef
allen so many of our fellow professionals.
Taken from ACADME January-February 1996 pp. 23-25
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